Palin: Just Plane Folks

Mrs. Sarah Palin, who once held a temp job as Alaska’s governor and got elected as a small town mayor so she could hire a city manager to do her job for her, has learned from all those grueling months in public life. Her recent running mate, presidential candidate Senator John McCain, rented a campaign bus to reach out to the hoi polloi, but actually travelled on a private jet owned by his wife, a millionaire beer baroness.

Mrs. Palin is campaigning to sell “her” book (ghost-written by Christian magazine editor Lynn Vincent) with a tour bus that drives to Sam’s clubs and strip malls across the USA. The bus on this “road trip” is so highly decorated that you can’t even see if Mrs. Palin is aboard. That’s handy, because she isn’t.

Mrs. Palin is actually travelling on (you guessed it) a private jet that rents for $4,000 an hour. The aircraft is reported to be a Gulfstream II with two Rolls-Royce Spey 511-8 turbofan engines, a 4,123 mile range, and a top speed of 581 mph. Technical specifications for the Palin tour bus are not available.

Mrs. Palin has experience with private jets. She campaigned for Alaska governor by vowing to sell the state jet on eBay. She kept part of that promise. The jet was listed on eBay for a year, stored, unused, in a heated facility at state expense, until it was finally sold to a political supporter through an aircraft broker, not on eBay.

Turns out that the principal use of the state jet was not taking the previous governor on pleasure jaunts but ferrying Alaska’s felons to and from contract prisons in Arizona. With the jet no longer available, state prop planes were diverted from law enforcement duties to make those trips, now two days long each way. Governor Palin’s spouse, First Thug Todd, was upset that the remaining state planes weren’t readily available for pleasure jaunts and had people fired for it.

Please let us know where those episodes appear in Mrs. Palin’s new book.

Now I know how she is getting from Salt Lake City to Reno to Idaho in a couple of days. Guess she got enough of driving through the snow while on temp duty in Alaska. Guess she didn’t think of using the Alaska Air National Guard to ferry her bus on one of its C-130s.

“mrs. jones” wrote: ….the woman has a bonafide education just like your president ….

Mrs. Palin certainly had an education. She attended 5 of the best backwater colleges in the country, one of them twice. Oddly, although she rants about the press, her own degree is in journalism. And you are misinformed — the lady has not made her transcripts available, either.

On the other hand, screaming loonies motivated the director of Hawaii’s Department of Health and the state’s registrar of vital statistics to confirm that Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu, and that official records of this fact conform to all standards and laws.